St. Paul’s Parish is blessed with visitors throughout the year. A lot of visitors are on the Island in the summer. Many of them are from these red shores and have dropped into St. Paul’s on a Sunday morning because they grew up here or their parents worshiped here. Afterwards, and on several occasions, these visitors will say to me, “It’s not my parent’s Church anymore.”
This has never been said to me with a negative connotation or disappointment or disapproval. It is made as a statement of fact—that St. Paul’s has changed and evolved. It is also said with a sense of a need for change and evolution.
The Church, this church or any church, no longer has the influence in society it once did. I dare say that the Church no longer has the influence in churchgoer’s lives anymore either. That’s a good thing. We each have minds to think and hearts to love. We are no longer encumbered with the notion that one thing or another must be true because the Minister says so. Discernment, both intellectual and spiritual, is a tool available to us all.
My best hope for the Church of the future is that it be one that I don’t recognize either, that one day my kids will say, “it’s not my dad’s Church anymore.”
The one thing that I am most confident about when I think about God’s Holy Spirit is that she never calls people to doing the same thing. God’s presence in the world has always called people to something new.
It’s like the that TV commercial about people becoming nose-blind to odor. When the Church becomes nose-blind to the stink we produce in the world it’s time to listen to what people say or do around us. The world is passing us by because of the odor—it’s old and familiar. And if it is old and familiar perhaps it is no longer “of God.” It is no longer that new thing to which God calls each generation.
I think St. Paul’s Parish is not our parent’s Church anymore. We are emitting a new smell in the world. A smell of inclusion and justice; of mercy and forgiveness; of love and joy.
The amazing quality of the Gospel is its ability to be fresh (and relevant) to each generation. Our role is to let this new breeze blow with the power of the Holy Spirit.
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